After Container Ships Came for the Docks, Self-Driving Comes for the Roads

A wave of automation is coming for truck drivers, not knowledge workers. The threat is not crashes. It is the quiet removal of millions of drivers from the economy.

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

You’ve seen the videos: a Tesla driver is behind the wheel — filming for whatever reason — and the car starts to veer into the opposing lane or the computer bleeps and bloops into shutdown mode. Or there’s a Waymo smart car, unmanned, its LIDAR spinning, wandering around a parking lot or mistaking a motorcycle for a highway on-ramp. The videos are supposed to scare us. The robots are coming and they’re going to crash into us, right?

Wrong.

They’re going to do something far worse.

True self-driving vehicles are nearly impossible given current technology and level of investment. A friend who works on partially autonomous mining trucks, the kind that carry tons of ore and lumber out of distant jungles, talked about the six trillion dollar truck driver.

“It’s going to cost someone six trillion dollars to replace human drivers completely. That includes the technology, the wireless connectivity, the processing power to let a truck drive itself from LA to New York without anyone behind the wheel,” he said. “Right now, they’re going to spend a fraction of that to keep humans in the loop. But what happens when that number goes down? What happens when six trillion becomes one trillion. Or a few billion?”

As we enter a new dystopian age, we have to remember what we’re going to lose and where we have to assert our humanity. While we all have seen the headlines where erstwhile CEOs have been laying off middle managers and knowledge workers to replace them with useless AI agents, imagine the coming apocalypse as soon as someone with big enough pockets pays the bill for the $6 trillion dollar truck driver.

The 3 Million Driver Time Bomb

The estimated total number of “Driver/Sales Workers and Truck Drivers” in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 3.51 million. This combines heavy and tractor-trailer drivers, light truck drivers, and driver-sales workers. In other words, it covers the long-haul truckers and the people dropping packages at your door.

Pay sits in a narrow band. Heavy and tractor-trailer drivers earn a median of about $55,990 per year. Light truck drivers are near $46,090. Driver-sales workers are around $38,230. These are national medians, which means the numbers can be pulled down by the folks making very little while hauling your pet food and coffee filters.

The American Trucking Associations estimate 8.4 million trucking-related jobs when you include dispatchers and warehouse workers. They say trucks moved about 72 percent of U.S. freight in 2024, which is not surprising given the state of the rail system.

Globally, women drive roughly 7 percent of trucks by some estimates, so they remain a minority in this massive and vital industry. Add in global numbers and one thing is clear. There is a huge cohort of young and middle-aged men standing in the path of automation.

What happens when millions of men lose their jobs at once? We have seen versions of this before. The Depression led to World War II which reshaped entire labor markets and communities by literally employing those men to kill each other. Then, more peaceably, came containerization.